The Bubble and the Floor
Vu Le on the Philanthropy Urgency Gap
A few weeks ago,I sat down with Vu Le for a conversation in the Abby Lab salon series. Vu is the writer behind Nonprofit AF and the author of Reimagining Nonprofits and Philanthropy, a book I have been pressing into people’s hands since I read it. We talked for a while about a lot of things, but one exchange has stayed with me.
Vu described a caseworker who visited a single mother at home. When the caseworker’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, she noticed numbers covering the walls. Written out by hand, taped up everywhere. She asked about them. The mother explained: those are the phone numbers I need my seven-year-old to memorize. In case I don’t come home.
A mother preparing her child for her own disappearance. That is the floor right now for a lot of families in this country.
And then there is the bubble.
The bubble is where a lot of major philanthropy lives. Not because the people inside it are bad, but because they are genuinely insulated from the floor. Vu made the point plainly: foundation CEOs and trustees are not on the ground. They are not talking to that caseworker, or that mother, or the mutual aid organizer running on fumes three months into a funding gap. And so, of course, the urgency doesn’t land the same way.
I have been in too many rooms where I have heard some version of: we want to see how this plays out before we move more resources. Meanwhile, the people on the ground are watching it play out in real time, in their communities, in their families. There is nothing to wait for. It is already here.
This is not a new critique. Vu has been writing about the distance between philanthropy and the communities they serve for years. What feels different now is the cost of that distance. We are not talking about whether a program gets renewed. We are talking about whether democracy infrastructure exists at all heading into midterms.
The urgency gap is real, and it is not primarily a resource problem. There is money. Vu reminded me that MacArthur’s $100 million commitment to democracy, which is genuinely meaningful, sits alongside endowments in the billions. The gap is not about what foundations have. It is about what they can bring themselves to feel.
That is a harder problem. Data hasn’t closed it. White papers haven’t closed it. What Vu kept coming back to was story. Real people, real stakes, delivered directly to the people holding the resources. Not through a program officer summary or a site visit itinerary. Actually directly.
That is a lot of what The Abby Lab is trying to do. Build the rooms where that kind of contact can actually happen, and then make sure the right people are in them.
We have a long way to go and not much time to get there.
Let’s get to work.